The real-life answer would be: yes, nearly always - how can you assign incidents to staff if you don't have records of staff? The grey area is whether you store staff records in a place you call CMDB.

The exam answer I guess would refer to the books. ITIL V2 Service Support section 7.3.7:

Quote:

The CMDB may also be used to store and control details of IT Users, IT staff and business units, although the legal implications of holding information about people in the CMDB should be considered. Storing such information in the CMDB would allow personnel Changes to be related to Changes in CI ownership.

In V3, the Service Transition book, under Types of Configuration Item, states

ITIL doesn't dictate that the CMDB is one tool. In fact, staff information would nearly always be in an HR system or/and something like Active Directory - with links from the 'service desk' bit of the CMDB.

In real life you need to ask do you need it to contain staff. Remember that CMBD is not assets database. The most important concept of CMDB is that is stores relationships. Thus, if you need to identify your people in the database and relate them to other CI's because your processes have been designed in a way that they need that information present, then you most definitely should.

The people may go away (change process via the HR department ?) and the access that they have or not would go away but the role may not_________________John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)